The Clink Charity receives Royal recognition for staff development and training

St James’s Palace, London, 30^th October – The Clink Charity has been commended for its commitment to developing and training its staff at the 2019 Princess Royal Training Awards.

Chris Moore, Chief Executive of The Clink Charity received the Award from HRH Princess Anne at an awards ceremony held at St James’s Palace yesterday. These prestigious Awards honour UK employers for their outstanding training and development programmes, which have directly resulted in measurable success.

The Clink Charity used their application to the Princess Royal Training Awards to highlight the rigorous training and development of their staff, gaining City & Guilds qualifications in the course of their work with prisoners. On-going support and training is essential in an environment that can sometimes seem bleak with many daily challenges.

The Clink has created a lasting impact by successfully linking skills and development needs to the business performance across the organisation, helping reduce reoffending significantly.

The training The Clink provides for their employees equips them to deliver the aims of the charity: changing attitudes, transforming lives and creating second chances.

Commenting on the Award, Chris Moore, CEO said: “Receiving recognition from HRH Princess Anne and The Princess Royal Training Awards is such an honour for all of us at The Clink Charity. Our dedication to reducing reoffending through training prisoners to gain their City & Guilds qualifications plus skills pertinent to the Hospitality sector has been recognised at the highest level, and we are delighted. Our staff are the centre-point of this award: I am incredibly proud of each and every one of them.”

 Chris Jones, Chief Executive of the City & Guilds Group added: ‘We are thrilled to be able to recognise the work that HR and L&D teams do to train, upskill and reskill teams; helping individuals to reach their potential and find meaningful employment, while supporting businesses in developing the skills for success, and ultimately producing the productive workforce we so urgently need. The organisations we recognise today all provide compelling evidence that tangibly proves the value that comes from investing in people.

The Princess Royal Training Awards, delivered by the City & Guilds Group, are now in their fourth year. Each of the applications were assessed against three Hallmarks of Excellence by the Princess Royal Training Awards Commission, which comprised of HRH The Princess Royal and leading figures in the business and training community.

Chris Moore CEO The Clink Charity spoke at The Princess Royal Training Awards, delivering the following speech:

Transcript of speech given on Wednesday 30^th October at St James’s Palace

Distinguished guests, 

What an honour it is to be here this afternoon at St James’s Palace to celebrate together our collective success in being awarded a Princess Royal Training Award which is now in its fourth year, having been established by the City & Guilds Group.

The Princess Royal Training Awards Commission have recognised all of our organisations and awarded us with this accolade which symbolises best in class training efforts and setting us apart as organisations that are delivering the finest training programmes in the UK at this time.  The end result is that we have all created a lasting impact by successfully linking our skills development needs to our business performance.

The application process for these prestigious awards is, as I’m sure you will all agree, a very thorough one.  Through our own application process The Clink Charity team found it very beneficial to reflect on our prior work, previous achievements, and really quantify what are doing and how we could demonstrate that it works. 

 We applied for the award because we wanted to highlight how we train and develop our own staff to work in such a unique environment whilst delivering on our core values of compassion, professionalism and integrity, in an environment that can sometimes seem bleak with so many daily challenges.

The aim of The Clink Charity is to reduce reoffending rates of ex-offenders (or as we like to call them Clink Graduates) through creating a real-life working environment in prison.

 We operate 4 fine dining training restaurants open to the public, 2 horticulture programmes, growing most of our produce and 4 production training kitchens in prisons. We also operate an event catering business in London (based at the Guildhall and St Pauls Cathedral) and a high street café in Manchester, both these projects train the homeless and ex-offenders to help them gain their City and Guilds qualifications and digital qualifications in order for them to get their lives back on track, rather than going down the wrong route which could have led to a custodial sentence.

 In order to deliver the high standards required from our graduates by 4 and 5 star hotels and Michelin stared restaurants when they are applying for jobs we have to employ professionals from the hospitality and also horticultural industries who are all fully qualified and have a very successful career.

 However, what they don’t have is any experience of working within a prison or delivering education formally. When we recruit a new Clink team member they have to go through Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Services security vetting process. Once they receive their clearance, they have key training and also learn how to operate the radios. There are then another 6 specialist prison service courses to attend from conditioning training (which is anti corruption) to SASH (which is suicide risk awareness training). At this stage they are now fully cleared and qualified to work in the prison.

 We then start to train them to be able to train our prisoner students in a real-life working environment. This is called a TAQA qualification which is short for – Training, Assessment and Quality Assurance. This takes 3 to 6 months to gain. It involves our trainers being trained on how to deliver one to one training and also having supervised training and assessment sessions with the students. At the end of their course they are qualified to train and assess learners who are working towards gaining their City and Guilds NVQ Levels 1 /2 and 3.

 Our staff work to train and empower our learners, delivering high quality training in a sometimes challenging environment that replicates life on the outside. Our team are not only working in a restaurant (or garden) on the inside as an industry professional but they are also taking on some of the role of a prison officer and also a catering college lecturer as there are no prison staff on a day to day basis in the training areas.

The training we provide to our employees equips them to deliver the aims of the charity which is to: Change attitudes, Transform lives and Create second chances.

 It is this training that we have been recognised for today for the Princess Royal Training Award.

 Our Clink staff then go on to train our prisoner students who not only gain their City and Guilds qualifications and practical experience, but they also gain soft skills such as confidence, motivation and pride as well as learning to work as part of a team. This may be the very first time for some of them.

 Quite often when the students come to us their identity is their past – how many times they have been in prison or the category of their crime. But within a few weeks of being in The Clink their identity changes to their hope for the future and how many units they have already completed towards their NQV. 

 The other group of people I would like to think that we train are the 100k members of the public who dine with us every year in our restaurants. Every dish served to our diners is made from fresh, local and seasonal ingredients which provides our students with the opportunity to learn how to prepare and serve the dishes which will go towards them gaining their qualifications.

 Our only barometer of the effectiveness of introducing the general public to life inside prison is Trip Advisor. In 2018 all our restaurants were No 1 during the same week in their respective areas. This included Brixton out of 22k London restaurants. By allowing the public to dine with us we are helping them to understand that the prison population is made from a cross section of society just like us and they all deserve, want and need a second chance.

 The Clink Charity has celebrated its 10^th birthday this year and we are also celebrating 10 years of delivering City and Guilds accredited training to over 2,500 prisoners.

Sadly, there are 86k adults in prison today in the England and Wales- 82K men and 4k women and of those released 48% return to prison within the first 12 months.

 Recently the Justice Data Lab with the Ministry of Justice carried out some independent research on our most recent data surrounding the effectiveness of our programme. Their research showed that Clink graduates are 65% less likely to reoffend within the first year of release compared to non-participants in a group of similar people. The overall reoffending rate was as low as 7% in some of our sites.

 The main reason for this is that we are one of the only organisations that deliver a 5- step integrated program. We train prisoners during their last 6 to 18 months of their sentence and upon release our fulltime support workers meet them at the gate and help them find accommodation and fulltime paid employment. The support team are then there 24/7 to help our graduates re-adjust back into society and not re-offend.

 Richard Branson, founder of Virgin says – “Train people well enough so they can leave, and treat them well enough, so that they don’t want to”. 

 This statement carries a lot of meaning, and it should undoubtedly be one of the driving forces for all our organisations.

 So, in conclusion I am sure you will agree it is an absolute honour to receive our Princess Royal Training Awards today from Her Royal Highness on behalf of our employees, who are the lifeblood of the work that we all do, and these awards today is for them.

 Once again, many congratulations to all of you and I sincerely hope that you enjoy this very special day.

Thank you.